Introduction
Martin Luther King, Jr., inspired by the words of John the Revelator, believed that there are three dimensions to a flourishing human life; these are:
§ the ‘length’ of life, expressed through the realisation of our uniqueness;
§ the ‘breadth’ of life, expressed through commitment to community life;
§ and the ‘height’ of life, expressed by embracing a purpose for living beyond the empirical.
These dimensions are, also, conditions of human freedom; King contends: ‘The essence of man is found in freedom’ (King, 1967b: 98). King poses the question: ‘What is freedom?’ and answers: ‘It is, first, the capacity to deliberate or to weigh alternatives… Second, freedom expresses itself in decision… A third expression of freedom is responsibility. This is the obligation of the person to respond …’ (King, 1967b: 98).
The first realisation of freedom relates to a life lived in accordance with our individual uniqueness. The second turns on our choosing to act with and for others. The third reaches to the divine dimension of human life.
These dimensions of human life, along with their corresponding conditions of human freedom, are, for King, negated whenever human beings are segregated from each other. King says: ‘The immorality of segregation is that it is a selfishly contrived system which cuts off one’s capacity to deliberate, decide and respond’ (King, 1967b: 99).
The ‘length’ of life: King and Plato on perfecting the particular
King, like Plato (1973), believes that in perfecting a particular skill, craft or profession an individual achieves personal fulfilment and grace. He writes:
After one has discovered what he is made for, he should surrender all of the power in his being to the achievement of this. He should seek to do it so well that nobody could do it better… no one ever makes a great contribution to humanity without this majestic sense of purpose and this dogged determination. (King, 1963a: 69)
And:
Not all men are called to specialized or professional jobs … many are called to be labourers in factories, fields, and streets. But no work is insignificant. All labour that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence. If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. (King, 1963a: 71)
Like Plato, King embraced the view that each person has a particular calling or vocation. To young persons, King offers this advice: ‘You must early discover what you are made for …’ (King, 1963a: 70).
Of the three conditions of a truly human life identified by King, it is the realisation and the perfecting of one’s calling which most illuminates the possibilities for and the complexities of human freedom. King rejects an unlimited conception of freedom, and explains:
Freedom always operates within the limits of an already determined structure… Freedom is always within destiny. It is the chosen fulfilment of our destined nature. We are always both free and destined. (King, 1967b: 98)
Here King points to the paradox of human freedom: We are most free when we chose to live our lives in accordance with a destiny over which we have no control. (It is this, metaphysical view of the human condition and freedom, that Berlin (1969) deems both unsound and dangerous.)
A positive view of freedom: internal barriers
What does it mean to deny other person their freedom? If we conceive freedom in purely negative terms, then we might speak of the restriction of movement and of the denial of open speech. But if we conceive freedom, not merely in terms of what we can and cannot say or do, if we look to the denial of freedom that occurs whenever a person has been made to feel unable or unworthy of speaking or acting, then we begin to reach into the depths of what freedom and its negation might mean. Humiliation, a curse of segregation, is for King, a violence against the ‘length’ of life. Responding to a letter from eight Alabama clergymen who described non-violent protests in Alabama as ‘unwise and untimely’, King wrote:
[W]hen you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored” … when your are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness” then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. (King, 1963: 192)
Taylor (1979/1997) describes the positive concept of freedom as ‘an exercise-concept’, and argues: ‘If we are free in the exercise of certain capabilities, then we are not free, or less free, when those capacities are in some way unfulfilled or blocked’, and, crucially, that ‘the obstacles can be internal as well as external’ (Taylor, 1997: 420). King illuminates the ways in which external impediments to freedom give rise to internal barriers:
Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, are so drained of self-respect and a sense of "somebodiness" that they have adjusted to segregation … (King, 1963: 196-97)
King insists that until persons feel themselves free to act and speak, freedom of action and speech can never be realised, and that until persons feel themselves worthy of these freedoms they cannot rise up and demand them. He writes:
As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free. Psychological freedom, a firm sense of self-esteem, is the most powerful weapon against the long night of physical slavery… The Negro will only be free when he reaches down to the inner depths of his own being and signs with the pen and ink of assertive selfhood his own emancipation proclamation. With a spirit straining toward true self-esteem, the Negro must boldly throw off the manacles of self-abnegation and say to himself and to the world: “I am somebody. I am a person. I am a man with dignity and honor[”] … This is positive and necessary power for black people. (King, 1967b: 43-44)
Marx criticised Kant thus:
Kant was satisfied with “good will” alone, even if it remained entirely without result, and he transferred the realization of this good will, the harmony between it and the needs and impulses of individuals, to the world beyond. (Marx, 1977: 97)
King, like Marx, refuses to distinguish the freedom of the will from the lived, embodied freedom of the person. He writes:
In speaking of freedom I am not referring to the freedom of a thing called the will… freedom cannot be thus abstracted from the person … So I am speaking of the freedom of man, the whole man … (King, 1967b: 97-98)
In other words, it is not enough that a person should be free to say or act as they like, and nor is it enough that a person should feel themselves to be in control of their will: freedom is the coming together of the liberated mind and body.
The ‘breadth’ of life: The good community and human interdependency
A belief in the perfectibility of human life-activity lead Plato to envision a society organised around an unbending division of labour and a rigid division between those who lead and those who are lead. King rejects Plato’s view of the good community for two reasons. First, King points to the ways in which a divided and hierarchical community negates freedom. Second, King sees no contradiction between an individual pursuing a particular good and their attempt to understand and realise the universal good.
1. The consequences of segregation
In his ‘magnificent myth’ aimed at promoting ‘conviction’ in the organisation of Republic (Plato, 1973: 159), Plato says of the Guardians:
If one of their own children has bronze or iron in its make-up, they must harden their hearts, and degrade it to the ranks of the industrial and agricultural class where it properly belongs … (emphasis added, Plato, 1973: 160-61, 415)
On the one hand, these words point to Plato’s mistrust of aristocracy with its belief in a birth-right to power; but, on the other hand, it illuminates the consequences of the rigid separation of persons: the ways in which one class of persons can come to feel itself degraded even as another begins to feel elevated. So, we might ask how Plato’s myth can be properly distinguished from racism, which King defines as ‘the myth of inferior peoples’ (King, 1967b: 71).
On the other side of the elevation of the Guardian’s into the realm of ideas there is the forced relegation of the many. Thus, King writes:
Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I-it" relationship for an "I-thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. (King, 1963: 193)
In advancing his ‘magnificent myth’ to the citizens of the Republic, Plato envisions a speech which with the words: ‘You are, all of you in this land, brothers’ (1973: 160, 415). King writes:
Segregation is established on pride, hatred and falsehood. It is unbrotherly and impersonal… Segregation denies the sacredness of human personality. (King, 1967b: 97)
2. The individual, the particular and the universal
Plato insists that there must be an absolute distinction between the Guardians and the persons they lead, that leaders can and must learn of the universal Good, while the lead must learn of their particular good. Plato, then, locates leadership of the community in the hands of the few. King wants all persons to have some responsibility for the governing of the good society. King asserts: ‘No man has learned to live until he has rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the boarder concerns of all humanity’ (King, 1963a: 71). In other words, by denying the many an education in the universal, Plato limits their human freedom. If all persons are to be truly free all persons require an education in ‘the boarder concerns of all humanity’. It is in this capacity to enrich and enlarge our vision beyond the self, to reach out in compassion to the other, that King locates the sacredness of persons, and in segregation he sees the negation of precisely this sacredness.
The living truth of interdependency
Marx, Plato and King are united in the belief that the breath of human freedom can be measured by how far an individual has moved from ‘the chains of a paralyzing self-centeredness’ and to a concern for ‘the welfare of others’ (King, 1963a: 71). For King, interdependency is both a metaphysical and a living truth of human existence; he insists:
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. (King, 1963: 189)
To accept and embrace human interdependency, to live life outstretched to the other - this, for King, is to realise of the ‘breadth’ of life and that freedom which is distinctly human.
The ‘breadth’ of life and pluralistic and participatory democracy
How are we to live together? Some models:
Difference is rejected
Difference is swallowed up by the powerful
Different groups are forced to be separate
Diversity is allowed, but no differences emerge
Diversity is allowed, but different groups do not mix
Diversity is valued: the differences between us make a difference to us
King’s answer is located in the final of these models. He expressed his vision of the good community thus:
The aftermath of non-violence is the creation of the beloved community. The aftermath of non-violence is redemption. The aftermath of non-violence is reconciliation. (King, 1957)
In a ‘beloved community’, freedom is realised through participation. Thus, King connected the ancients’ concept of freedom with the freedom he wanted for all Americans:
In the first century B.C., Cicero said: “Freedom is participation in power.” Negroes should never want all power because they would deprive others of their freedom. By the same token, Negroes can never be content without participation in power. America must be a nation in which its multiracial people are partners in power. This is the essence of democracy toward which all Negro struggles have been directed since the distant past when he was transported here in chains. (King, 1967b: 54)
Here is a vision of the democratic society as participatory and pluralistic, a society where differences - no longer conceived as deficiencies – arise between persons in order that they might deepen and enliven them. Minow says that it is only by ‘taking difference into account’ that we ‘can overcome our pretended indifference to difference’, and thereby ‘people our worlds with those who can surprise and enrich one another’ (Minow, 1987/1997: 522).
King writes: ‘Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue’ (King, 1963: 191). His ‘beloved community’ is a community of dialogue guided by compassion, where there is ‘a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality’ (King, 1963: 195). Hence, King’s judgement: ‘Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation’ (King, 1968: 178)
Diversity is not, then, to be celebrated, tolerated, or accepted – diversity is to be lived: diversity is to be the very life-breath of the ‘beloved community’. Thus King says, in the spirit of hope:
The Negro, through self-acceptance and self-appreciation, will one day cause white America to see the integration is not an obstacle but an opportunity to particulate in the beauty of diversity. (King, 1967b: 123)
References
King, M.L. (1957) Birth of a new nation, Sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, 7 April 1957, Montgomery, Alabama. Available: http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/publications/speeches/The_birth_of_a_new_nation.html
King, M.L. (1963) Letter from Birmingham jail, in: Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (ed.) C. Carson (Grand Central Publishing). Also available: http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/letter.html
(See also: Statement from Alabama clergymen, available: http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/popular_requests/frequentdocs/clergy.pdf )
King, M.L. (1963a) Strength to love (London, Hodder & Stoughton)
King, M.L. (1967a) Where Do We Go From Here? Annual Report Delivered at the 11th Convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 16 August 1967, Atlanta, Georgia, available: http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/publications/speeches/Where_do_we_go_from_here.html
King, M.L. (1967b) Where do we go from here: Chaos or community (New York, Harper & Row)
Marx, K. & Engels, F. (1977) The German Ideology (Ed. C.J. Arthur) (Lawrence & Wishart, London).
Minow, M. (1987/1997) Justice Engendered, in: R. E. Goodin & P. Pettit (Eds.) Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology (Blackwell: Oxford)
Taylor, C. (1997) What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty?, in: R.E. Goodin & P. Pettit (Eds.) Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology (London: Blackwell)